Cool stuff!

^nice albertdutton!

Ok all, here's a pretty cool 3D printing related contest being run by Instructibles! They are offering 13 different printers as prizes so it might not be too difficult to win one. I wanna see if anyone here at Shapeways can win one of these! I may enter if I think of something and have the time.

Besides being able to produce prototypes quickly and efficiently, 3D printers are also able to create complex shaped pieces that are impossible to make using traditional manufacturing techniques. That's why American Standard has embraced 3D-printing for its new line of twisted faucets that seem physically impossible.
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That being said, mass-production of 3D-printed objects is still a little tricky. It actually takes about 24 hours to produce these designs using an additive laser sintering process on metal powder, and they still need to be further hand-finished and polished afterwards. That's why American Standard expects them to each for sell for anywhere from $12,000 to $20,000 when finally available next year.

http://gizmodo.com/these-impossibly-twisted-3d-printed-fauce ts-somehow-act-1712321989

Oh! That is cool! For me that's one of those, "Hey why didn't I think of that!"

Oh my! Look at this! This cooler than an emperor penguins' left flipper! This is a technology that is definitely going to go somewhere! I can even imagine that 3D printing applications will evolve from it as well.

Femtosecond lasers though. It'll be a while before the price comes down to earth.

That display has good applications as attention getters for advertising. Not sure exactly what they are doing. Is the hologram holding the data for the various image frames and used for the variable focusing via phase modulation? It almost looks like analog data storage with digital servo mirror scanning to place the frames into 3D space. Too much to contemplate on a weekend!

I was a little confused myself until I saw this diagram from this page.

It appears that both the plasma voxel image created by the galvos and the computer-generated hologram created by the spatial light modulator are both 2D in nature and then what makes it 3D is that verifocal lens.

It would be so fun to play around with this!

The scanning techniques for lasers are pretty standard stuff and have been used in laser shows since the 1970's. It's that spatial wave forming that's the complicated part. It somehow "focuses" the laser beam for each voxel at a point of specific distance from the scanning mirrors. And I'm not even sure if it truly focuses the laser in the classic sense, since that implies a wider generated beam that is narrowed at the ionization spot. The modulator may instead be compressing a longer laser pulse such that it is spatially compressed to a critical energy density value at the desired ionization point. But that kind of thing usually requires a source with multiple wavelengths and relies on dispersion in the propagating medium. An alternative method is to fire multiple beams at a specific point in space to get reach the critical energy density. In theory the modulator could be doing that if your lasers were set up in an array and all focused on the same point, but that causes more complicated alignment issues you have to deal with.

At the most basic level I don't get the need for the spatial modulator at all. The varifocal lens and scanning system appear to be all that you need. You do need to do some math to convert x-y-z data to a spherical reference system but that should be easy. Maybe the spatial modulator simplifies the math processing? They appear to only be projecting one voxel at a time so why the modulator that shows the generation of multiple beams but that would lower laser power density for each beam. Anyway, fascinating but it will need some more review to figure out exactly what the heck they are doing!

Since they seem to be able to do this in a fluid it could have some 3D printing applications. using liquid resins, as long as they aren't too opaque to the laser wavelengths.

I found that the magic is coming from that varifocal lens. They explain the entire experiment in great detail here. Taken from this page.

I would love to take a water jet cutter and cut that lens in half to see how it works exactly!

Edit: No message body error.

Ok, I don't need to cut it in half as I found a video of how it works. It's an Optotune EL-10-30 and it actually deforms the lens electronically. Take a look. This is almost as cool as the tactile 3D plasma display! HAHA!

The spatial modulator must just be there to simply increase the number of projected pixels per laser pulse. But with more pixels comes the need for more laser power. I wonder what total power is coming out of the laser source. It would depend how much energy you need to ionize each voxel, which depends on number of voxels, laser wavelength, focusing factor, whether you are ionizing oxygen, nitrogen, or both, and how much energy you are losing through the optical system. You just can't have too much power density early on to get ionization within the projector. This isn't as new as I thought. This was already being presented in 2011. The micro-sized image tactile system must be the most recent refinement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v= KfVS-npfVuY

Yeah, looks like it has been around a wile now, but the big deal here is the femtosecond laser, which renders the generated plasma voxels harmless. Then again, extended use would probably cause one's fingertips to slowly erode away ! HAHA!

If I could get my hand on a cheap femtosecond laser I would stop what I was doing and try to develop this into something. One of the cool things I thought of, is if this could be scaled up significantly, then it could be used as a display for all types of vehicles that operate in the atmosphere. Imagine an automobile for example where the dashboard readout was outside of the car! Everything could be projected out in front of the car a few feet and would remain there no matter what speed the car was traveling at.

Or how about this, imagine a lighting system where a 3D scanner quickly scanned an area and then this femtosecond voxel plasma system projected the 3D scan superimposed on top of the actual terrain that was just scan milliseconds earlier. So this then, would make for a very futuristic out of this world lighting system!

An interesting question is, they are saying that one can feel these plasma voxels. Right? Well, if one has a powerful enough laser can one generate enough force to make something like a femtosecond plasma voxel bed? So, one would be suspended on billions of plasma voxels per second happening kind of a thing. Not likely, but that certainly would be cool if it could be made to happen.

I've been starting to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13, so if my writing looks kind of different that would be why.

They are probably using a beam compressor to make the short pulses unless they are using some strange type of avalanche laser that generates short uber-high power pulses. Beam compression also yields an increase in the power of each pulse so that seems the logical way to go since there is less stress on the laser.

Sounds like you know quite a bit about lasers! Do you happen to know of any open source hardware projects concerning high power carbon dioxide lasers? Something in the 150 W range would be interesting if you know of anything happening within the various laser communities.

Not intimately involved with lasers but I've been tangentially connected to their use for various test applications. All low power stuff to measure things like mechanical displacement. And even then it amounted to watching someone else do the actual work. Nothing too fancy and nothing that can etch your name in anything!

I see I see.

It sure would be cool if someone came up with an open source hi power laser of some kind though. I tend to wonder what the big deal is for making a hi power CO2 laser. If I weren't working on 89 other things I'd look into it!

Maybe one day.

3Ders did a nice article on large scale 3D printers. Top 20 Biggest 3D Printers in 2016

This website is a great place to go for artists looking for art related contests to enter!

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) want's you to be Lex Luthor and invent ways to wreak havoc on the world using ordinary off the shelf components and technologies! And if you can think of some very cleaver way of causing harm using ordinary stuff and tell DARPA how it could actually be done they with shower you with LOTS of money to try out your idea; provided it's a really interesting idea that is better than the other ideas submitted.

NO! I'M NOT JOKING!!! HAHAHA!

I learned of this on the IEEE and here is the DARPA website concerning such. Apparently anyone can participate and even though this is related to the US military you don't need to be a US citizen to register and make a submission.

Soooo in short, DARPA want's to pay you to be Dr. Evil! AWWWW HAHAHA! TOO COOL!

Dr. Lawful, you mean. Check the text, it says " in any way within the bounds of local, state, and federal laws and regulations".

They should check prior art, but only thanks to recent law changes.

^^hehe!

Oh my gosh I've been feeling soooo EVIL!!! HAHA! You would not believe all the ways I thought of about how to kill everyone since seeing that DARPA request! HAHAHA!

You guys should be feeling lucky I'm a nice guy. I'm a Dr. Lawful at heart.

But I do really love Kill Everybody ~ Skillex